Prima Facie

by Ruth Downie

  “No.”

  He was not looking as impressed as she had expected. “What is the matter? It all makes sense! Even Flora said Titus used to flirt with lots of girls.”

  He slumped back against the desk. “Don’t talk to me about Flora. I just caught her and the boyfriend stark naked in the bathhouse.”

  “Really?” She could not resist a smile, but that seemed to make him even more grim-faced. “Oh husband, they are going to marry anyway! What did you expect? What were you like at that age?”

  Instead of replying, he pointed in the direction of the room where they had left the ailing Corinna. “I’m not having my sister end up like that.”

  She placed a hand on his arm. “Flora will not end up like that. She has chosen a much better man. Now stop sulking and tell me, am I right about Publius and Titus?”

  “I hope not.”

  “I know it is more bad news for Corinna, but—”

  “It’s bad news for us, too,” he said. “We owe Publius more money than you can imagine. What do you think he’ll do if he knows we suspect him of murder?”

  “But am I right?”

  He shook his head. “Just leave it be, Tilla. We’ve done what we said we’d do: Verax is free to marry my sister, which I suppose I’ll have to agree to—”

  “What about Xanthe?”

  “Xanthe’s gone off with a man and a pile of money, and the Empire is a very big place to hide in.” He pushed himself off the desk. “Sometimes, wife, you just have to let things go.”

  21

  The day was fading by the time the worst seemed to be over for Corinna. Ruso left her asleep in Flora’s bed, being watched over by her own slave and by Tilla. He and Publius retreated to the haven of the study, where Publius sank onto the couch and put his head in his hands. “All that for nothing,” he muttered when Ruso told him there was no sign of a miscarriage so far. “And you won’t do it?”

  “If it were to save her life,” Ruso said, pushing open the shutters to reveal the evening sun slanting through the vines and wishing he didn’t have to have this conversation. “I’d risk it. But it’s not the pregnancy that’s put her in danger. It’s the things she’s done to try and end it.”

  Publius shook his head and muttered, “You have no idea.”

  “I suppose there’s no point in speaking to the father?”

  The silence that followed was broken only by the chirrup of the cicadas and the distant laughter of children: one of them the nephew who would have drowned today if Verax had not been there to save him.

  Ruso said, “You’re welcome to stay here tonight. I’ll get some food brought in if you don’t want to face my family.”

  “Thanks.”

  At the moment all they could do for Corinna was to offer her more thorn-root and a safe place to recuperate. Perhaps a safe place was what Publius needed too. He could not be more than eighteen or nineteen years of age: young to be plunged into running the sort of complex family affairs that must accompany the name and the wealth of a Germanicus. If, just as he had shouldered these responsibilities, a so-called friend had seduced his younger sister…

  Ruso leaned on the windowsill, but the vineyard had ceased to be a relaxing view ever since he had spotted the fugitive Verax out there. The more he thought about it, the more likely it seemed that Tilla was right about the murder. And the less likely it seemed that Publius would ever admit it. The blame would rest with Xanthe, who had taken a bribe and fled. It wasn’t ideal, as Tilla had pointed out, but neither was picking an unnecessary battle with a man to whom your family owed a great deal of money.

  His attention was caught by a pale shape weaving an unsteady course along the stone path below the window. A dead moth, its wings partly extended, was being carried by a crowd of ants. When they approached a gap between the stones the ants turned the moth this way and that, trying different approaches until they found one that took it safely across.

  The ants that were not carrying the moth seemed to be urging their comrades on and occasionally stepping in to help. They all gave the impression of being excited about their one task and agreed on their direction of travel.

  If only a human family could form such a willing and co-operative—

  He stepped away from the window. A man had sunk to worrying depths if he found himself jealous of a colony of ants.

  Someone was approaching along the corridor. He felt his stomach tense. The sound of footsteps faded, and he let out a long breath. In here, for the moment, there was peace.

  Beyond the study walls, two women were in trouble. One of them was a “decent” girl with a loving brother: the other a prostitute whom he’d never met, but who seemed to be considered dispensable to everyone who knew her—except his own wife.

  Despite what he had said to Tilla, Ruso was still torn between searching for a tactful way of asking who Corinna’s lover was, and not wanting to know. If it really was Titus, then the murderer was sitting barely six feet away with his head bowed and his hair sticking up between his fingers. Meanwhile the relatively innocent Xanthe, duped into making herself look guilty, was in danger of being murdered herself. And Ruso had unwittingly been part of the deception.

  The fate of Corinna, no matter how you saw it, was pitiful. It was not hard to imagine the arguments between her and her brother once he had found out the reason for her strange behaviour. No doubt, in the heat of the moment, he had been angry with her. No doubt he had said things that had caused her to despair. Because Corinna was not a girl who could vanish from one town and reappear in another to make a fresh start. While Xanthe earned a living by selling herself, a wealthy heiress was a commodity for others to set out on a stall in the marriage market, and since the death of their father it was Publius’s job to get the best deal for her that he could. It was all very well for Tilla to smile indulgently and say, “They are going to marry anyway!” For Corinna and her brother, an unwanted pregnancy would make a satisfactory deal much harder to come by.

  Ruso closed the shutters in case anyone passing should overhear, and remarked into the gloom, “If I were to find out someone had been bedding my sister behind my back, I’d be furious.”

  No response.

  “Especially if he was someone I trusted.”

  “I’d be angry with her, as well,” Ruso went on. “For not having more sense.” I might even be angry enough to tell her nobody else would want her. But not now that he had seen the damage such words could do. Now he wanted to run after Flora and tell her it was all right: that as long as she was healthy and happy he really didn’t care what she got up to. Within reason.

  He heard his guest shift on the couch.

  “I would expect the man to own up to his responsibilities.”

  Finally Publius said, “He laughed. He said it might not be his, how could anybody know?”

  Ruso tried to imagine his own fury if Verax had said something like that about Flora. It was worryingly easy. Hesitantly, not wanting to push too far, he said, “I’d want to—” He was interrupted by a knock on the door. “I’m busy!”

  “Master, it’s two men for Master Publius. They’ve brought our cart back and they’ve come to collect his carriage and they want to know if he’s going home in it or if they should leave now while there’s still some light.”

  Publius called, “Tell them I’ll be home tomorrow.” As the footsteps faded away down the corridor he added, “You were about to ask if it was me who killed Titus.”

  Ruso was conscious of taking a breath before he spoke. “Was it?”

  “Are you hoping to blackmail me into cancelling your loan?”

  “I’m not sure what I’m doing, to be honest. I know that if I were you, I would have wanted to kill him.”

  Publius said, “I’ve been trying to sort this out ever since Corinna told me. It just gets worse. I only wanted to shut him up. I truly didn’t mean to…” His voice died away.

  Ruso waited.

  “They were all over the house,” Publius co
ntinued softly. “Wrecking things. As if they didn’t care. I warned Titus to clear off. He told me not to spoil everyone’s fun. He gave me the wine jug and told me to calm down. I was so angry that I—” He paused. “I keep trying to make things right. But everything I do makes it worse. When the kitchen maid said she’d seen the driver standing over the body, I thought the gods had sent me a way out. I mean, he was only a slave!”

  Ruso said nothing.

  “Then I found out he was Titus’s brother. Because of me, poor old Sabinus was going to lose both sons at once. But I couldn’t confess, could I? I had Corinna to look after. So I thought if I made it clear that my girl never actually saw who did it, Sabinus was bound to send somebody round asking questions. And I paid Xanthe a lot of money to lie about Verax and then disappear. I guessed she wouldn’t know enough to be convincing.”

  “That was a risk.”

  “I could hardly expect her to knowingly incriminate herself, could I?”

  “And you got your friends to say she’d been seen with Titus just before his death.”

  “They were too drunk to know what was going on. Everyone was supposed to blame her and then you wouldn’t need to save Verax and you wouldn’t ask any more awkward questions.”

  Ruso said, “You should have spoken to Titus’s father.”

  “And discuss my sister’s honour with somebody else? Titus was supposed to be a friend. I thought he would do the right thing.”

  “You’d really have wanted your sister married to Titus?”

  “He was set to inherit the estate. She liked him. He could be fun. It would have been a good alliance.”

  Suddenly the simple wheelwright son of a slave seemed to Ruso like every matchmaker’s dream.

  Publius sighed. “It’s the funeral tomorrow. I suppose I’ll have to go.”

  “Yes.”

  “I made one mistake, Ruso. In the heat of the moment.”

  “Yes.”

  “So I suppose the question is, are you and I going to ruin each other over one mistake?”

  22

  Ruso was beginning to think that having a study wasn’t such a good idea after all. As soon as a man retreated to be alone with his thoughts, people knew exactly where to find him. Not that he was thinking: anything was better than dwelling on the memory of Titus’s funeral pyre this afternoon, so he was doing his best to distract himself. A battered scroll of Dioscorides’ advice on medicines lay on the desk in front of him, weighted down at one end by an inkwell and at the other end by a small bowl that now held only a scatter of nutshells and pastry crumbs. He was almost at the end of a passage about the properties of wine made with seawater froth—unsurprisingly, the great man deemed it useless in either sickness or health—when there was yet another knock on the door.

  All Dioscorides’ previous interrupters—Ruso’s stepmother needing money to pay the cushion-maker, a farm hand seeking approval for a decision, and a neighbour asking him to remove a dried bean from a small girl’s ear—had apologized for disturbing him.

  Tilla, striding in with Mara perched on her right hip, did not bother. “Flora says,” she announced, “that Verax went to the funeral.”

  He lifted his forefinger from the cramped text and immediately lost his place. “Titus was his brother,” he said, knowing this was not what she had come to discuss. His offer to take the baby was ignored, so he indicated that his wife might like to sit on the couch. The couch was ignored too. Instead, Tilla leaned back against the closed door so there was no escape, and said, “She says Verax heard that Xanthe is dead.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry.”

  “You knew this?”

  He settled into what he would always think of as his father’s chair and tipped some crumbs into his hand so Mara could help herself. “Sabinus told everyone at the funeral. The man he hired to find her conveniently came across her body just outside town.”

  “The man murdered her.”

  “It sounds that way,” he said, watching his daughter’s small fingers pick out a crumb with impressive precision.

  “Were you thinking of telling me?”

  “Of course.” It was true. He had been thinking of telling her, and then thinking of ways he might avoid it. He was certainly not going to mention the way Publius had turned pale at the news.

  “You know Xanthe did not kill anyone. All she did was tell a lie because that Publius asked her to.”

  Ruso considered rephrasing this as, She took a bribe to incriminate an innocent man, and decided it would not help.

  “So,” his wife continued. “What will you do?”

  He said, “The same as I’ve done until now. Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  Mara’s dark head turned from one parent to the other. Plainly she sensed the tension even though she did not understand the words.

  Tilla said, “I do not understand.”

  Ruso, not entirely sure he understood himself, busied himself brushing the last crumbs off his hands.

  “In return are you hoping Publius will do nothing about the money your family owes him?”

  “He offered to forget the loan,” he said. “Naturally I refused to accept.”

  The eyes that were the colour of the sea opened wide and stared into his own. For once, his wife was lost for words.

  “It would be like taking a bribe for silence,” he explained.

  Tilla pursed her lips, and he resisted the urge to keep talking.

  “Already,” she said, “you are doing one wrong thing. I do not know why you cannot hold your nose and do another one.”

  He took his time rolling up the scroll, gently tapping the ends so that the edges were neatly aligned.

  “Are you going to tell your brother you have thrown away this money your family could have saved?”

  “Probably not.” Absolutely not.

  She watched while he slid the scroll back into the leather case, then said, “Is it true that Publius is going all the way to Egypt to join a legion?”

  “The Third Cyrenaica,” he told her. “He knows someone who can recommend him for a tribune’s post. He’ll take Corinna with him.”

  “And is it true that Egypt is even hotter than here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ugh,” she said. Then she added, “But it is a long way away. They can tell people the baby’s father died, and nobody will need to know the rest.”

  “I’m glad you approve.”

  “I am very sad for Corinna.”

  He said, “I’m sad for both of them.”

  “There is no need to look at me like that,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  “I too will do nothing and say nothing, because telling the truth will bring worse trouble to Corinna.”

  “I hadn’t really thought of that,” he confessed.

  “Also,” she added, “if your brother finds out what you have done about that money, neither of us will be welcome here ever again.”

  23

  By the afternoon of the next day Corinna was feeling well enough to enjoy a little sunshine in the garden. Mara was indoors taking a nap, so Tilla settled Corinna on cushions in the wicker chair and then joined Marcia and Flora on the bench under the dappled shade of the pergola. Flora was prattling on happily about wedding plans while at the same time complaining that her mother would drive her mad fussing over every detail.

  “Now you know what I had to put up with,” Marcia told her.

  “And then I suppose it’ll be, when are you going to have a baby?”

  Neither of them had been told why Corinna was ill and obviously Flora had not guessed. Tilla glanced across at her patient, who was leaning back with her eyes closed. “Are you comfortable here, Corinna?” she asked, wishing they would talk of something else. “We can go inside if you are too hot.”

  Corinna shook her head. “This is a lovely garden.”

  Was it? Tilla narrowed her eyes against the glare and surveyed the cracked and emp
ty fountain basin. The ancient pergola that looked as though only the vine around it was stopping it from falling on their heads. There was nothing in the weedy flower beds that you could eat, and only one thing you could use for medicine, and the air throbbed with the screech of insects that sounded as if they were being shut in a door… but Corinna was right. If you closed your eyes and inhaled, the scent drifting across from the purple lavender filled you with wonder. And with sadness, because although Corinna was still alive to enjoy it, Xanthe would never again feel the warmth of the sun on her skin, nor hear the drone of the bees as they went about their work.

  Publius had avenged his sister’s abandonment by killing Titus, and then sacrificed Xanthe to escape punishment. Even Tilla had agreed to do nothing more about it. Even Tilla, who had met Xanthe and liked her, was now guilty of acting as if one young woman deserved justice more than another.

  The whole thing had been about honour, but it was hard to find any honourable part of it. Apart, perhaps, from her husband’s refusal to accept payment for his silence. And now they were hiding that as if it were a guilty secret.

  Her eyes opened at a shout from the direction of the gate, followed by the cries of children. Flora broke off from whatever she was saying and said, “They aren’t fighting again, are they?”

  “Leave it to the staff,” said Marcia. “If there’s no blood, there’s no need to get involved. And if there is, we’ll send Gaius.”

  “It does not sound like fighting.” Tilla stood up and shaded her eyes. “It is your brother come home!”

  It was an echo of their own arrival a few days ago. Lucius and his wife were barely inside the gates when their children raced up to greet them. The slaves carried the bags to the house while small voices competed to be heard.

  “I nearly drowned in the water!”

  “The boys stole my oil flask and put beetles in it!”

  “He nearly knocked my eye out, look!”

  “I have missed you all!” Their mother was dragged down into a forest of clutching arms while the solid form of their father paused by the gate to survey the scene, his expression hidden by the shade of his straw hat.